The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology

Edward Howells (ed.), Mark A. McIntosh (ed.)

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198722380.001.0001
Published: 2020 Online ISBN: 9780191789205 Print ISBN: 9780198722380

FRONT MATTER

Introduction 

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https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198722380.002.0006 Pages 1–5
Published: February 2020

Subject: Religion
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

MYSTICAL theology is central to Christianity. It has been present from the earliest times as a way of
participating in and re ecting upon God’s hidden presence—as Christians have come to understand that in
the light of their beliefs about the inclusion of creation in Christ’s intimacy with the Father through the
power of the Spirit. Over time, the practices, texts, and teachings that seem to foster inclusion in this
intimacy have all become the material of mystical theology. While pointing to the mending and perfecting of
creation that God seeks, mystical theology also considers the further Christian belief in the fontal
breakthrough of the divine source into human experience, and the new possibilities of meaning and action
that arise in the subject and the community as a result.

Yet potential readers of this volume may be curious about the signi cance of its title: why ‘mystical
theology’ and not ‘mysticism’? Some readers could be concerned that this volume might impose theological
dogma upon what they may see as a more universal religious experience, or, conversely, that it might
substitute abstract theoretical interpretation for a lived reality whose meaning is unique to each individual.
We do understand these concerns. We may not agree with their premises, but we believe there are good
reasons why they may be allayed—and why a historically informed and critically generous understanding of
mystical theology may be helpfully advanced.

First of all, we note that ‘mysticism’ is itself a modern term and one that few of the gures discussed in this
volume would have recognized. It was coined in an era whose theory of the relationship between experience
and interpretation has been interestingly problematized; so it sometimes carries presuppositions that can
work against a thoughtful development of the hermeneutics of mystical texts (by tending to privilege an
attempted reconstruction of putative mystical experiences ‘behind’ the text). As Bernard McGinn notes in
the general introduction to his authoritative history of Western Christian mysticism:

Mystical theology has often been understood in terms of misleading models of a simple distinction
between experience and understanding that do justice neither to the texts of the mystics nor to the
p. 2 complexities of the relations between experience and understanding that modern
epistemological and cognitional theories have presented to us. Mystical theology is not some form
of epiphenomenon, a shell or covering that can be peeled o to reveal the ‘real’ thing. The
 interactions between conscious acts and their symbolic and theoretical thematizations are much
more complex than that. … Rather than being something added on to mystical experience, mystical
theory in most cases precedes and guides the mystic’s whole way of life.

(McGinn 1991: p. xiv)

Mystical theology, as McGinn suggests, works attentively and intentionally at this always unfolding
interplay between mystical insight and theory on the one hand and the embodied realities of mystical life on
the other. So in calling this a handbook of mystical theology, the editors by no means intend to devalue
religious experience (see Howells, Chapter 3, for a full consideration of this important topic). Rather we seek
to engage with a very long-standing discipline, one that has not only played a crucial role in the theological
life of the Christian community but which is also an increasingly signi cant topic in the academic study of

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theology and religion.

Like many forms of contextual and emancipatory theology, mystical theology is critically aware that there
are no ‘views from nowhere’, and that all our experience is mediated and profoundly structured by the
language and culture and community we share. Indeed mystical theology, also much like liberation
theology, directly lives from and re ects upon the reciprocal relationship between Christianity’s texts,
practices, and beliefs, and on the other side, the community’s sense of its ongoing encounter with God (see
Williams, Chapter 1, for an account of this unfolding reciprocal relationship). In the 1960s the mystical
theologian Thomas Merton o ered a series of talks for the novices of his monastery; he explained his goal
by highlighting exactly this reciprocal relationship between mystical consciousness and the church’s beliefs
and teachings:

Without mysticism there is no real theology, and without theology there is no real mysticism.
Hence the emphasis will be on mysticism as theology, to bring out clearly the mystical dimensions
of our theology, hence to help us to do what we must really do: live our theology. Some think it is
su cient to come to the monastery to live the rule. More is required—we must live our theology,
fully, deeply, in its totality. Without this, there is no sanctity. The separation of theology from
‘spirituality’ is a disaster.

(Merton 2017: 1)

While the editors of this volume would not of course wish to rule out the possibility that some readers might
be helped to live their theology and be graced with sanctity, our explicit aims are mostly more pedestrianly
academic than spiritually audacious: to help readers see, as Merton puts it, ‘the mystical dimensions of our
theology’, and the profound contribution of mystical teachers to Christian theology.

Nonetheless, Merton’s perspective is deeply informative, for it underscores two essential features of
mystical theology across the rich variety of its expressions. First, mystical theology, far from being
narrowly concerned with specialized spiritual experiences, engages with the whole range of Christian
p. 3 beliefs and teachings, theology ‘in its totality’ as Merton says; and second, mystical theology explores
and interprets every doctrine to help believers nd there a doorway into a living, transformative encounter
with the divine reality to which, Christians believe, their theological language is meant to point—allowing
Christians, as Merton puts it, to live into their theology. As Aquinas observes (Summa Theologiae II-2.1.2),
the faith of a believer by no means reaches its goal in the propositions of the church’s teaching, but rather in
the superabundant divine truth itself—which theology can only approach through the vitally necessary but
always insu cient medium of human speech. It should not be surprising, then, that there is an expression
of Christian theology, mystical theology, particularly focused on, so to speak, turning the creed into prayer,
guiding believers into the ‘more’ of divine meaning beyond words—and this transforming contemplative
consciousness then, reciprocally, permits the Christian community to understand more deeply what it
 believes and to clarify and critique the manner in which it expresses and lives its beliefs (see McIntosh,
Chapter 2, for a theological rationale for mystical theology).

Mystical theology is mystical per se not because it deals with the experiential (though it sometimes does) but
because it deals with what is ‘hidden’, beyond what mortal eyes can see and tongues can speak: the in nite
superabundance of divine self-communication availing itself of creaturely modes of expression, and
present there as a hidden, or mystical, reality and depth of meaning. For Christians, of course, the most
radically self-communicating advent of this divine speech in creation is Christ: the in nite divine meaning
expressed through frail yet vindicated human esh. The hypostatic union in Christ of true humanity and
true divinity becomes the ground for mystical theology’s attention to all the other forms of divine presence:
in scripture, liturgy, the creation, historical struggles for justice, and in the lives of the marginalized. It is

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precisely because the mystical presence of God is an in nite reality that mystical theology draws the
believing community into an encounter that must a ord not only discursive knowledge, but transformative
understanding and embodied wisdom.

So this volume provides a guide to the mystical element of Christianity as a theological phenomenon. In this
respect it di ers not only from psychological and anthropological studies of mysticism, but from other
theological studies, such as more practical or pastorally oriented works that examine the patterns of
spiritual progress and o er counsel for deeper understanding and spiritual development. It also di ers from
more explicitly historical studies tracing the theological and philosophical contexts and ideas of various key
gures and schools, as well as from literary studies of the linguistic tropes and expressive forms in mystical
texts. None of these perspectives is absent, but the method here is more deliberately theological, working
from within the fundamental interests of Christian mystical writers to the articulation of those interests in
distinctively theological forms, in order, nally, to permit a critical theological engagement with them for
today.

This rationale is re ected in the structure of chapters. Part I introduces the approach to mystical theology
(Chapters 1–3) and o ers a historical overview (Chapters 4–5). Part II attends to the concrete context of
sources and practices of mystical theology (Chapters 6–13). Part III then moves to the fundamental
p. 4 conceptualities of mystical thought (Chapters 14–21). And Part IV ends with the central contributions of
mystical teaching to theology and metaphysics (Chapters 22–33).

Readers with a variety of interests will nd di erent pathways through the book. The structure permits
those with historical interests, for instance, to focus on the historical-intellectual emphasis of the chapters
of Parts I and II. Spiritual practices are treated especially in Part II. Literary interests are served especially in
Chapters 12 and 13. Those with theological interests may be attracted to the interplay between the mystical
conceptualities explored in Part III and mystical contributions to theology and philosophy considered Part
IV. Extensive exposition of individual mystical teachers is present throughout the book, and can be traced
with the help of the index.

We are grateful to the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago whose
generous assistance allowed many of the authors of the volume to meet at Loyola to work collaboratively on
the shape and focus of the volume as well as to discuss preliminary sketches of many chapters. We were
deeply honoured to have as our interlocutor at this gathering Adriaan Peperzak, Professor of Philosophy at
Loyola. From the earliest stages of the volume through to its publication we are immensely grateful and
indebted to Jacob Torbeck, Ph.D. candidate in theology at Loyola, for his adroit and insightful assistance
with all matters editorial and beyond.

We are profoundly grateful to all of the contributors to this volume, not only for their thoughtfulness and
erudition, but especially for their collegial spirit and costly willingness to work together in creating a
volume that would not simply be a collection of papers but strive for genuine coherence. In writing the
 speci c chapters we together discerned as necessary for a comprehensive volume, the authors have made it
possible for us all to o er you, the readers, our collective wisdom about the shape of this eld.

The editors would like to express our deep gratitude, and to honour the memory of those who were
participants from the very early stages of this project but whose names do not appear because of their
untimely deaths: William Harmless SJ, Professor of Historical Theology at Creighton University, John
Hughes, Dean of Chapel at Jesus College, Cambridge, and Dennis Martin, Professor of Theology at Loyola
University Chicago. We regret the absence of their contributions and remember them with a ection.

Finally, it is to Bernard McGinn that the editors would like to o er particular gratitude, not just for his two
chapters in this volume, but for his towering contribution to the eld, in his multi-volume history of
mysticism and numerous monographs and articles. His work has shaped the eld. As a professor at the

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University of Chicago, he launched perhaps not a thousand scholars of mystical theology, but many dozens,
a good few of them authors here. Just some of the fruits of his work are on display to a degree, we hope, in
the present endeavour.

It seems tting to conclude this preface by giving the last word to a mystical theologian herself, indeed one
of the greatest of the Middle Ages: Catherine of Siena. Even in this very brief excerpt from one of her letters,
readers will nd notable features that could prompt multiple lines of inquiry: for example, the nature of the
epistolary form as a genre of mystical writing, the role of the mystical teacher as social agent, the important
p. 5 resonances with analogous teachings in the tradition (see e.g. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names 4.13;
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.37.2 ad 3), and the creative and sophisticated rhetorical interweaving of
multiple Christian doctrines with unabashedly erotic and anthropomorphic imagery.

As you read Catherine’s powerful and a rming words to her correspondent, written during a time of
harrowing plague, when human life must have seemed not only terribly vulnerable but perhaps also of little
use and without point, we hope you will feel encouraged to venture deep into the pages of this book, where
you will nd many colleagues ready and willing to join you in the search for deeper meaning and
understanding.

Love, then, love! Ponder the fact that you were loved before you ever loved. For God looked within
himself and fell in love with the beauty of his creature and so created us. He was moved by the re
of his ine able charity to one purpose only: that we should have eternal life and enjoy the in nite
good God was enjoying in himself.

(Catherine of Siena, Letter 28; No ke, 2001: i. 132)

Bibliography
McGinn, Bernard (1991), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, i. The Foundations of Mysticism (New York:
Crossroad Publishing).

Merton, Thomas (2017), A Course in Christian Mysticism (Collegeville, MN.: Liturgical Press).
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No ke, Suzanne (2001), The Letters of Catherine of Siena, i (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies).
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